c0t0d0s0.org

Glenn.Fawcett of Sun and Andrew.Holdsworth of Oracle held a presentation about the performance characteristics of Oracle on CMT: Growing Green Databases with Oracle and Sun UltraSPARC T-series servers. The presentation offers an interesting insight: The higher the amount of parallel session the more favorable the number of yielded transactions per seconds. Additionally the presentation offers some handy tuning tips for running Oracle efficently on CMT systems.

Oracle and CMT are often a natural choice. Whenever you have many parallel requests and the latency isn´t a key performance indicator, you should give it a try. But sometimes there are loads, that should scale well on CMT systems but they don´t scale well. In most cases there are some quirks in the SQL statements that makes the code single- or few-threaded. Glenn Fawcett summarized some great tips for Oracle and CMT in a series of blog articles to overcome such problems.

(via: Stefan Hinker)

The Oracle DB got even more expensive as stated in the new pricelist (dated June 16, 2008): From $15,000 for the Standard Edition, $40,000 for the Enterprise Edition and $20,000 for RAC to $17,500 for Standard Edition, $47,500 for the Enterprise Edition and $23,000 for RAC. The core mulitpling rules haven´t changed. More reasons to think about Mysql for matching workloads.

Although a little bit advertising, the blog entry of Jignesh Shah points to an interesting fact: You can easily spend hundred times the server price for the database license. The business case to use a proprietary database should be a really good one. There are still companies out there, who use databases like DB2 or Oracle for all data because they did it so for the last 10 years. Opensource RDBMS like Postgres or Mysql may have not all functions of an Oracle, but you should ask yourself: Is this advantage really big enough to justify 40.000$ or 15.000$ per core? In my humble opinion this price tag justifies a dual database strategy.

There is a slight but extremely important change in the licensing modell of Oracle. The Multicore FAQ states:

Oracle Database Standard Edition can only be licensed on servers that have a maximum capacity of 4 sockets. When using RAC to cluster this limitation is mirrored in the cluster. It may be licensed on a single cluster of servers supporting up to a maximum of four sockets.

What does this means: Our workhorse server V490 is now usable with Standard Edition. So you can save a vast amount of money. Instead of 3 Licenses (each core is counted as 0.75) Enterprise Edition you need only three licenses Standard.

Or you can build an incredible powerful OLTP RAC-Cluster with 4 T2000 servers. Although they have 32 threads there is only one single socket per Server. 128 parallel threads = 4 UltraSPARC T1 = 4 Sockets = within the limitation Standard Edition. Standard Edition = RAC included.

And now the kicker: Niagara 2 equals 64 threads per socket. Means 256 threads per 4-node cluster. But: Still only 4 sockets. And you surely know it: Still Standard Edition.

Networkworld Inda published a good article about multicore processing and the challenges of licensing: Servers: multiple cores to go.After reading this article it´s obvious, that multicore licensing is still a topic without any standards.

The "Unbreakable Linux Support"-Announcement generated some buzz since yesterday. But ... you should look very precise and look beyond one´s one nose to take alternatives into considerations.

An example: Take an Sun Fire X2200 M2 with 2 processors. This is a system, Oracles marketing touts for it´s RAC deployments. Small node, not much availability knickknack.

• Support 24x7 (Premium Support) for Redhat AS: 2499$ (Quelle: Redhat.com Store)
• Support 24x7 (Premier Support) for Linux at Oracle : 1199$ (Quelle: Oracle UBL FAQ)
• Support 24x7 (Gold) for Solaris X86 at Sun: 420$ (Quelle: sun.com-Store)

And to add insult to injury: The price for Solaris contains hardware maintance Monday to Friday from 8-8 with onsite technican in 4 hours. And now tell me that Sun is expensive, Oracle cheap and the Redhat pricing isn´t downright obscene.

There seems to be a little missunderstandig in the marketplace. T2000 is the best Application- and Webserver. End of Story. Really ? Well, not really. We've made some interesting benchmarks based on the iGen OLTP Benchmark that perpetuates the story of T2000. For the people unaware of iGen OLTP-Benchmark :

The iGEN-OLTP 1.5 benchmark is a SUN internally developed transaction processing database workload. This workload simulates a light-weight Global Order System that stresses lock management and connectivity. This benchmark is easily portable on any database that support the ANSI v2 standard.
The database has 1.25 million customers residing in it, and is approximately 6 GB in size. The transactions are comprised of various SQL transactions: read-only selects, joins and insert operations.
The transaction mix for iGen in this test are 39% heavy-weight, 43% medium-weight, and 17% light-weight queries).

Three machines were compared in this benchmark:

Sun Fire T2000 (8 cores, 1 chip, 1.2 GHz US T1) Solaris 10, Oracle 10gR2
Dell 6850 (4 cores, 4 chips, 3.12GHz Xeon EM64T) SuSE9, Oracle 10gR2
Dell 6650 (4 cores, 4 chips, 3.0GHz Xeon MP) RH4,Oracle 10gR2

The Dell systems are reasonable choices for a database Servers: Same storage. Same amount of memory on all systems.
The result:

Sun Fire T2000 - peak users 5750, 162,080 tpmM
Dell 6850 peak users 1300, 44,490 tpmM
Dell 6650 peak users 2450, 60,730 tpmM

Wow ... okay....

• The Sun Fire T2000 server beats the 4-way Dell PowerEdge 6850/Linux and 4-way Dell PowerEdge 6650/Linux configurations in head-to-head on Oracle OLTP database performance.
• The Sun Fire T2000 server is 3.7x faster than a Dell PowerEdge 6850 with four 3.12GHz Xeon EM64T processors.
• The Sun Fire T2000 server is 2.7x faster than the Dell PowerEdge 6650 with four 3GHz Xeon 32-bit processors with 3 MB L3 cache.
• The Sun Fire T2000 server is able to operate efficiently at very high loads and is very stable showing over 6,000 user connections using Oracle 10gR2. In contrast, the Dell Systems could only support 2,500 user connections and exhibited instability.
• Not only is the Dell PowerEdge 6850 3.7x slower than the Sun Fire T2000 it also requires 1.6x more power at 510 watts. (Dell PowerEdge 6850 has four 3.12 GHz Xeon EM64T).

To this one i want to add my personal experience:

•The Oracle/Linux solution is often costly and complex to setup and maintain due to hidden or unclear compatibility and version dependencies.

Imagine you have an Quad-Opteron rig from Sun, a big storage array from a well known manufacturer and Oracle. Oracle supports certain distributions with certain linux kernels, the opteron rig supports certain distributions with certain linux kernels and the multipathing drivers for the storage array supports certain distributions with certain linuxkernels. Only one thing is missing ... the intersection. And now tell me that it's easy to run professional computing on linux. This stuff can drive you crazy. And "okay, it's not supported, but it will run" doesn't count ... not for central systems in an enterprise.

Oracle has new rules for licencing. You can find the Licencing-FAQ and the rules unter this link.
For UltraSPARC T1 this leads to the following licencing:

SF T2000, 4 Core = 1 x Standard Edition One
SF T2000, 8 Core = 2 x Standard Edition
2 RAC-Knoten SF T2000, je 4 Core = 2 x Standard Edition
2 RAC-Knoten SF T2000, je 8 Core = 4 x EE + RAC Option

Oracle has realeased 10g for Solaris 10 for x86.

Okay, i´m not in the office ... well ... for a few days, and the world goes mad: Free Oracle Licences for bigger Sun systems. Okay, we have to wait for the exact rules, but this will be a hard punch for the competition.
The finanical world seems to gain confidence in Sun. The stock surged on friday:

We're unaware of any rumors floating around that would precipitate such a rush on Sun shares. Although, it appears that a large Sun investor is making some serious moves.

.
At last: Good report about the early days at sun

At last: The change in Oracle licensing is offical. A core of Ultrasparc T1 counts as 0.25 processors. It´s not promotional, it´s the new licencing scheme. More information in the press release. Thank you, Larry!

The Register reports:

On the database front, Oracle continues to baffle customers with its bizarre fractional pricing scheme to handle the emergence of multicore chips. On the mainstream dual-core products available from Sun, IBM, Intel and AMD, Oracle requires customers to multiply their total core count by .75 to figure out per processor licensing costs. With the eight-core UltraSPARC T1, Oracle has adopted a .25 model, so each of the new Sun servers will be priced as if it were a two-way machine. That's quite a bonus for Sun and its customers.

Really good news. The T2000 is an capable database server too. But the old licencing scheme would be a little bit prohibitive when using Oracle.